Google cofounders Page and Brin just made about $8 billion in a day

Google GOOG Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin just added $4 billion to their individual fortunes. And it’s all thanks to the stock market.

Shares of their company rose by as much as 16% last week after the announcement of better-than-expected quarterly results, and a promise to bring more discipline into the company’s spending. Shares closed at $672.93 last Friday, a one-day rise of more than $93, and in turn boosted the value of the shares held by both Page and Brin, as detailed by Bloomberg.

The rise isn’t just a windfall for the Google leaders; it’s also the biggest one-day creation of wealth, at $51 billion, in U.S. history, Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices told USA Today.

This has been a banner year for Page and Brin. Their respective fortunes are up 24% this year, an increase of about $7 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Chairman Eric Schmidt, who owns 1.3% of Google, has himself seen his fortune increase by 22% this year.

Their riches are tied to optimism by investors about the future of Google. Last Friday’s activity added $65 billion to the company’s market capitalization, the largest single-day gain ever. The rally made Google the second biggest company, behind only tech rival Apple AAPL, which has a market value of around $746 billion.

“People should take away that Google is a stronger and healthier company than what the Street had previously understood,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Robert W Baird & Co, in the Bloomberg report.

Schmidt, speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, defended the experiments as necessary for creating new and potentially blockbuster businesses. They may not seem relevant now, he said, but they will eventually as technology advances and circumstances like the rise in diabetes make them critically important.

“Most companies ultimately fail because they do one thing very well but they don’t think of the next thing, they don’t broaden their mission, they don’t challenge themselves, they don’t continually build on that platform in one way or another,” Schmidt said, according to Business Insider. “They become incrementalists. And Google is very committed to not doing that. We understand the technological change is essentially revolutionary, not evolutionary.”

Investors generally have no problem with Google’s search and ad businesses, its main money makers. But they have been more nervous about the company’s investment into more sci-fi projects and their unproven paths to profitability.

Schmidt emphasized that most of Google’s investments still go into the company’s core businesses like search and advertising.

This ‘Uber for helicopters’ startup just flew into a fight over noise

Some New Yorkers have a great trick to beat Memorial Day traffic: They pull up an app to summon Blade, an Uber-style helicopter service that whisks passengers to posh destinations like the Hamptons. The trip is made more pleasant thanks to sippy cups of rosé and other little perks furnished by Blade. The service is such a hit that well-heeled investors, including Google’s Eric Schmidt and IAC’s Barry Diller, just plunked down $25 million to help it grow.

But not everyone is rooting for Blade to succeed. Some New Yorkers hate the very idea of it—and not because it’s yet another tech startup aimed at the rich. Manon Gauthier, a film editor who lives in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, described her beef.

“I don’t like helicopters at all. It seems that there are more and more of them in Park Slope. I don’t remember hearing them when I first moved here nine to 10 years ago,” Gauthier says. “With the police interventions, tourist tours and the Hamptons commuters my residential neighborhood is getting more and more noisy.”

Gauthier is hardly the only one who has grown fed up with the constant whup-whup-whup over their heads. A coalition called “Stop the Chop,” founded in 2013, is mustering pressure to bring down the helicopters.

The group’s president, Delia Von Neuschatz, says the choppers bring virtually no economic benefit to New York, while creating a major nuisance for the millions of people who live under their flight paths. She adds that Stop the Chop, which has 2000 members drawn from riverside neighborhoods like Battery Park and Brooklyn Heights, is using its newfound non-profit status to raise money and muster political and legal challenges.

Von Neuschatz also says that Blade is less of a nuisance than the sight-seeing helicopters that swarm city skies, but that the problem is already out of control. “The commuter traffic is only a fraction, but the last thing the city needs is more helicopter traffic,” she says. “Absolutely, it will exacerbate things.”

Blade did not reply to repeated request for comment. The Eastern Regional Helicopter Council, a lobby group for the industry, said in a statement that “the helicopter industry is a critical contributor to the regional economy and to our region’s emergency response infrastructure,” adding, “Our industry has dramatically improved safety and reduced noise in this air space and continues to do so.”

A fight for helipads

For Blade and other aspiring “Uber-for-helicopter” services (including Uber itself), the key to making it work is not so much access to choppers, but in finding a place for them to land.

Even in tech-obsessed San Francisco, for instance, helicopter services are virtually a no-go as a result of citizen opposition. (Last year, the city reportedly obtained its first heliport in two decades, but one that will be restricted for medical services.)

Even Uber has come up short in making its “Chopper” service fly in San Francisco. A source familiar with the company last year said that regulations had stymied its efforts, and that Uber was contemplating barge options in the Bay.

In New York, however, three heliports in lower Manhattan are wide open for business. Well, for now at least.

Opponents have lined up support from city officials and local members of Congress to terminate the contract of the company operating most of the helicopters in the city. Stop the Chop’s Von Neuschatz claims Mayor Bill De Blasio could easily ground the choppers, but won’t do so for reasons that are “incomprehensible.” A spokesman for De Blasio’s office said he would look into the matter but failed to offer a formal comment.

The bottom line for now, then, is that Blade’s New York customers can probably sip their rosé in peace for the time being. But if the company wants to expand to other major urban areas, it will likely face a heliport-by-heliport battle.

If you’re curious, here’s a screenshot from Blade’s app which shows a one-way fare from lower Manhattan to the Hamptons (approx 106 miles) for $3,150; as the app suggests, you can save money if you are willing to share your ride with others.

Google averages a meeting with the White House every week

Staffers from search giant Google have visited the White House an average of once a week during President Barack Obama’s time in office, the Wall Street Journalreports based on visitor logs and emails. All told, Google employees have met with White House officials roughly 230 times since Obama took office.

The meetings between Google staff and White House officials ramped up in late 2012 while the company was facing an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Top Google executives also met with FTC officials as that investigation was wrapping up.

Via the Journal:

Google co-founder Larry Page met with FTC officials to discuss settlement talks, according to visitor logs and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt met with Pete Rouse, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, in the White House.

The FTC ultimately decided in early 2013 not to bring antitrust charges against Google after it voluntarily agreed to change its business practices. According to a separate recent report in the Journal, senior FTC staff recommended that the agency should bring such a lawsuit against Google, revealing just how close Google came to facing charges.

Google posted fourth quarter earnings in January of $6.88 a share, or up from $6.00 a share last year. Revenue rose to $18.1 billion from $16.86 billion. But analysts expected the company to report earnings of $7.11 a share on revenue of $18.46 billion, according to CNBC.

Google’s Eric Schmidt wants you to know Glass isn’t dead

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants to make it clear that Google Glass isn’t dead — in fact, it’s getting prepped for a retail release, he said in an interview published Monday.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt dismissed notions that the company’s January decision to stop selling the wearable face-computer meant it was going away for good. Instead, work is being done to “make it ready for users,” he said.

Google Glass wearers can use the device to take photos and video, connect to the Internet and receive reminders, among a host of other uses.

Schmidt added in the interview:

We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it.

In January, Google reported earnings that failed to meet analyst’s expectations. The company posted fourth-quarter earnings of $6.88 a share, up from $6.00 a share in 2014. Revenue was up to $18.1 billion from $16.86 billion. However, the company was expected to report earnings of $7.11 a share with revenue of $18.46 billion, according to CNBC.

Google’s Eric Schmidt: Apple and Google are tech’s top companies

Who are the top tech companies right now? Apple and Google, in that order, according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, speaking to a packed crowd at the SXSW conference today in Austin.

In a broader conversation focused on innovation with biographer Walter Isaacson, and US Chief Technology Officer and former Google exec Megan Smith, Schmidt explained that Google and Apple have very different models for innovation. Isaacson, who authored a biography of Steve Jobs, recalled Jobs telling Google co-founder and now CEO Larry Page that Google should focus on a few things rather than tackling everything – as it has done in recent years.

Schmidt’s response was that the two models work for each company and Google’s model was innovation at scale, with no limits on what problems can be solved. As a side note, Schmidt was noticeably using an Apple MacBook on stage to answer questions from the audience via Twitter, not a Google Chromebook laptop.

Schmidt also shared his view that we are still in the early days of really understanding artificial intelligence, but that artificial intelligence will be one of the greatest forces in history because it makes people smarter. Google GOOG has placed its own bets on the technology, acquiring AI company DeepMind in 2014 for $400 to $500 million.

Machine intelligence is a key future digital trend because companies that are using this technology to evaluate large data sets can become far more efficient and intelligent. But he cautioned that while there are a set of things that computers can do better than humans, including infinite memory, computers lack a key emotional attribute: judgement. Schmidt quipped, “I’m a utopian, not a dystopian.”

Tackling the issue of scaling innovation beyond just the tech world, Schmidt said the top three barriers to innovation, are the lack of educational opportunities, lack of broadband, and the “stupid policies” in the U.S. surrounding immigration. He added that there are three things that can be the solution to almost every problem: innovation, entrepreneurship, and broadband.

‘Trending’ software company Taykey raises $15 million

It’s easy to see what’s trending on the Internet, at least in a rudimentary fashion—just call up the top Google searches or glance at the trending topics feature on Twitter or Facebook. But there are many more indicators to use. Combined, they can more precisely identify a trend that’s sweeping the Internet and identify it long before it trends on Twitter.

Taykey, a New York startup that makes software for marketers, makes use of 50,000 inputs and 47 engineers with seven doctorates in natural language processing to build tools that surface trends. Inputs include anything from people “checking in” with Foursquare’s Swarm app to a widely popular weather event—Snowpocalypse 2014, anyone?—to a rush of edits on a particular Wikipedia entry.

For its first six years in business, Taykey’s business model has been to alert advertisers to trends occurring with their target audiences and automatically buy ad impressions next to trending content. For example, if a movie studio wants to target teenage girls who like music, Taykey would have told them last Monday that their target audience was talking about pop star Justin Bieber’s new Calvin Klein ad and instantly purchased ads on news stories, blog posts, and social content about the topic.

If you’re familiar with the story, you know what happened next. The next day the original, unedited version of the Bieber photo leaked showing that the photos had been modified to enhance his, ahem, bulge. Within 10 minutes Taykey’s algorithm picked up on the negative vibes around Bieber and pulled all the ads it was running alongside it. The company helps brands jump onto trends (and, if necessary, abandon them) automatically, targeted to specific audiences across many geographies.

Its strategy seems to be working. The 100-person company has “tens of millions” of dollars in revenue, CEO Amit Avner says, and counts brands such as AT&T, Verizon, Disney, P&G, MasterCard, Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, and Toyota among its clients.

Now Taykey is expanding its capabilities to do more than just buy ads alongside trending topics. The company is using its trend-spotting software to help brands create marketing campaigns that take into accound what’s hot with their target audience. Surely marketers for those brands were doing this before; Taykey’s algorithm is meant to infuse that process with more data in the form of a software platform. Taykey has already worked with brands including Red Bull and Volkswagen to use trending topics to alter their creative campaigns. General Electric has used Taykey’s new marketing platform to create blog posts on its sites that publish editorial content.

In addition to the expanded services it provides, Taykey has announced a $15 million round of venture funding from Innovation Endeavors, the venture capital fund of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, and existing investors SoftBank Capital, Sequoia Capital, Marker LLC, MSR Capital and Tenaya Capital. The company has raised a total of $32 million.

After two crashes, private space industry faces inevitable questions

It’s been a rough week for the private space industry. On Friday, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two crashed during a flight test in the Mojave Desert, killing one and seriously injuring another. On Tuesday, an unmanned Orbital Sciences Antares rocket exploded six seconds after lift-off in Virginia.

The back-to-back accidents raise inevitable questions about the safety and reliability of the emerging private space industry. Will space tourists and companies that want to put cargo into orbit take the risk?

“Gut reaction, this is a major setback,” said James Pura, president of Space Frontier Foundation, a non-profit that advocates more space exploration. “A lot of our hopes and dreams in the private commercial space industry lie in the success of the leading companies, and Virgin Galactic is one of those.”

The private space industry is receiving a huge influx of investment and attention. Elon Musk’s Space X, for example, has a number of contracts to deliver satellites and cargo into space. Another company, Planetary Sciences, backed by billionaires like Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, plans to mine asteroids. Meanwhile, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, got started in 2010 as a space tourism business, but has since detoured into making rocket engines.

Virgin Galactic, the space tourism start-up founded by Virgin mogul Richard Branson, had plans to take its first commercial trip 62 miles into the stratosphere by the end of the year. Over 700 customers have paid $250,000 to take a trip.

But it may be difficult to meet that goal after today’s accident, in which a test flight experienced what the company described as an “in-flight anomaly” that sent the craft hurtling to the ground. At least one of the test pilots escaped by parachute.

“Space is hard. And today was a tough day,” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides said.

Earlier in the week, Orbital Sciences, a company that carries customer payloads into space, suffered a huge setback when its launch went haywire. A rocket it launched in Virginia had to be destroyed just seconds after taking off.

“It is far too early to know the details of what happened,” Frank Culbertson, Orbital’s executive vice president and general manager of its advanced programs group, said in a statement. “As we begin to gather information, our primary concern lies with the ongoing safety and security of those involved in our response and recovery operations.

“From a financial standpoint it will take some time to assess the precise impacts; however, I can tell you that Orbital’s view for 2014 remains unchanged,” Garrett Pierce, Orbital Sciences’ vice chairman and CFO, said on a conference call with analysts and investors.

Of course, private space companies aren’t the only to suffer setbacks. NASA has had its own high-profile mishaps over the years, including two Space Shuttle accidents. Whether governmental efforts are any more risky than private launches is unclear. But one thing is certain.

“Space flight is inherently risky and we as humans are curious about space and always will be,” Pura, the foundation president, said. “Those brave pioneers are turning science fiction into reality. Our heart goes out to those brave pioneers at this time.”

Google’s Page, Virgin’s Branson backed satellite on failed launch

(REUTERS) – Google Inc Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Larry Page and Chairman Eric Schmidt are among a roster of billionaires who backed a small satellite built by privately held Planetary Resources Inc that was aboard an unmanned rocket that blew up during a launch on Tuesday.

Planetary Resources, which intends to mine asteroids for fuel, water and minerals, said it also counts Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson, Ross Perot Jr, former Microsoft Corp executive Charles Simonyi and John Whitehead, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, among its investors.

The investors also include Ram Shriram, former executive at Amazon.com, and Bryan Johnson, founder of online mobile payments company Braintree.

As an interim step, the Redmond, Washington-based company is developing small satellites with miniature sensors that can communicate with Earth. The Arkyd 3 was one of the test satellites to prove its technology, the company said.

The Antares rocket that exploded on Tuesday was built and launched by Orbital Sciences Corp, and was primarily carrying a Cygnus cargo ship with supplies for the International Space Station.

Rather than using dedicated launch vehicles that can cost millions per launch, Planetary Resources is building “spacecraft small enough to hitch a ride into space with larger, primary payloads,” the company said.

“Spaceflight is inherently risky,” Planetary Resources said in a statement, noting that the loss of its Arkyd 3 satellite, a 12-inch by 4-inch unit weighing 10 pounds, would not affect development of its next satellite, known as the Arkyd 6, which has been in development for several months.

“With the A3, the Planetary Resources’ team achieved most of our objectives when we delivered the spacecraft to the launch integration site,” the company said.

Planetary Resources said it will use Spaceflight Services Inc of Tukwila, Washington, to configure a ride on a future commercial launch vehicle in the United States. The launch is scheduled for the third quarter of next year.

In online search war, it’s Google vs. Amazon

Google has plenty of competition, but when it comes to online search, Eric Schmidt worries most about Amazon.

“People don’t think of Amazon as search, but if you are looking for something to buy, you are more often than not looking for it on Amazon,” Google’s executive chairman said during a speech in Berlin this week.”They are obviously more focused on the commerce side of the equation, but at their roots, they are answering users’ questions and searches, just as we are.”

His remarks come days before Google GOOG reports third-quarter results on Thursday. Analysts predict strong growth, driven once again by robust advertising sales.

Take the longer view however, and Schmidt’s concerns about Amazon AMZN may have merit.

For years, Google has been the undisputed online ad king. Digital ads generate 90% of the company’s total revenues, according to RBC Capital Markets, revenues which in turn, Google has used to underwrite other initiatives including the futuristic research lab, Google X. Over a decade later, the ads remain effective because they’re so ingrained in Google search: Search for, say, Sony’s PlayStation 4 gaming console and PlayStation 4 deals pop up in those subsequent search results.

This is why Amazon’s swelling sales, largely driven by retail sales on its site, are worrisome for a kingpin like Google. Why bother performing a Google search for a PlayStation 4 when shoppers can effectively jump through fewer hoops by heading directly to Amazon.com, buying a new or used unit and having it in two days or less?

As two of the largest tech companies, Google and Amazon have butted heads several times this year.

In August, Amazon acquired Twitch, a video streaming service Google also reportedly looked at, for $1.1 billion. It also made headlines when reports claimed that Amazon, one of Google’s largest ad buyers, had its own ads product in the works. Amazon Sponsored Links, as it’s being called, would work like Google’s search ads.

In theory, Amazon-generated ads may prove even more “clickable” for shoppers than Google’s because they may be better targeted. Like Google, Amazon collects a huge amount of data about its users. But unlike Google, Amazon has a long history of what shoppers have bought. That information could be used by Amazon to make its ads more relevant than Google’s.

For its part, Google has made the ad experience more Amazon-like, introducing features like five-star customer reviews and expanding Google Express, its same-day delivery service. By fetching products at bricks and mortar stores, Google can slowly build up a shopping history on potentially millions of its users.

But a future in which Amazon dominates global online retailing remains unlikely. In a best-case scenario, Mahaney predicts Amazon could own up to 20% of online retail sales worldwide. Most people will continue to shop elsewhere, which leaves a huge opportunity for a cash-laden adversary like Google.

“Unless you’re Alibaba, the competition will still likely have to use Google as part of their strategy,” Mahaney said.

In other words? Don’t expect Amazon and Google’s intensifying rivalry to cool down any time soon.